for people who care about the West

A corps of visitors, not discoverers

In Lewis and Clark Through Indian
Eyes, the late historian and journalist Alvin Josephy
assembles nine weakly linked essays by 10 Indian writers. A few
essays are solid; some are tough to get through. But together they
should enable the Anglo reader to pass through the looking glass,
as Alice did in Lewis Carroll’s classic, and see the
West’s history from a very different perspective.

As we know, the victors in any war write the history, and we have
had 200 years of such writing. From the victor’s side of the
looking glass, Lewis and Clark guided their soldiers through a
trackless wilderness filled with ferocious grizzly bears and
hostile Indians. They were sent West in 1804 by the nation’s
visionary president, Thomas Jefferson, who had just spent $15
million to buy the 827,000-square-mile Louisiana Territory. Lewis
and Clark’s job was to see what Jefferson had bought and to
nail down the United States’ possession of that land.

As with all creation myths, the story turns out
beautifully. Lewis and Clark push their way past an aggressive
Sioux band, survive a harsh winter with the Mandans, find their way
through the mountains to the Pacific, and return home 19 months
later, having lost but a single man, most likely to appendicitis.

The losers’ narrative differs, not in the facts but
in the interpretation. To appreciate this, it helps to read the
Indian writers’ essays with a traditional history at your
side, such as Bernard DeVoto’s Course of
Empire or Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted
Courage.

From the DeVoto-Ambrose side of the
mirror, the voyage was one long and heroic act, one close call, one
brilliant decision after another.

But here’s how
the late Indian historian Vine DeLoria Jr. describes the same
events in the opening essay of Lewis and Clark Through
Indian Eyes: "The expedition actually seems to have been
a tedious march from one place to another (with the route) made
known to them by Indians and French traders …"

According to DeLoria, the voyagers were the latest in a long string
of white visitors. The expedition encountered a population of
"half-breeds of French-Indian heritage, some people representing
second and even third generations out on the plains …"

From the Indian perspective, Lewis and Clark made a
fairly routine march through a land occupied by hundreds of
sovereign Indian nations. Those nations interacted with each other
through trade, war and treaty, much as European nations did
thousand of miles to the east. The Corps of Discovery, in the
Indians’ view, was actually a Corps of Visitors to a settled
landscape. Finally, the Corps wasn’t mapping land the United
States owned. According to essayist Roberta Conner, director of the
Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, Jefferson had bought only what
might be called hunting rights from the French, which allowed the
U.S. to attempt to colonize the Louisiana Territory by convincing
the Indian nations, through force or purchase or salesmanship, to
give over their lands.

But the Indian essays are rarely
recriminatory or bitter. The writings are family remembrances,
discussions of how unimportant the expedition was to the Indians at
that time, and attempts to imagine what their ancestors could have
done to avoid the disasters that came in the wake of the explorers.

Even though the expedition took place two centuries ago,
many of the essayists write as if it were almost a contemporary
event. Moreover, despite the immensity of the changes the
expedition presaged, some of the authors see the last 200 years as
just a blip in their collective lives. With the possible exception
of former Montana state Sen. Bill Yellowtail’s essay on
individuality versus tribal identity, their struggle is to hang on
to who they are, recover what land they can, and wait for these bad
times to pass.

The story of Lewis and Clark is now over
two centuries old. And yet in its drive to expand and commercialize
the United States, in the greed of the expedition’s leader,
and in the hypocrisy of the nation’s leader, it is a very
modern tale.